Four Ways #SimpleGratitude Changed My Life

April 17, 2016 By Ali Valdez

We are all products of our society. It is nearly impossible to avoid. Facebook is a purveyor of unfiltered public opinion of the likes never before seen and whose implications not yet understood for our future.

When I first joined what some of my friends call the “crack”book, I loved being able to reconnect. I embraced all sides of my past-lives: different companies, different fields, extended family, high school, college, all the towns I’ve lived in, all the people I have met and friends I have made along the way my journey of life. Sigh. Over time, and multiple months spanning posts from the contemplative to indulgent to the downright mundane, I would tax my right thumb scrolling through posts and with friends’ babies and dogs, always clicking, commenting and liking

Then I saw the trend. There was “that guy” in the feed. The stereotypes began to stand out in the crowd. You all know him or her. The family member with the slightly cringe-worthy bully pulpit approach to expressing his uninformed politic perspectives; the old friend who always posts provocative and flirtatious selfies; Mr. and Mrs. #firstworldproblems; and most notably in my line of work, the bikini beach yogi quoting the oft-misquoted Rumi, Kabir or Gibran.

It is hard not to find cynicism in pockets of your heart when you have friends exploding over mis-made $9 lattes or the parking spot that was stolen from them. I quickly started feeling bad when I saw their posts. They often times made me bristle. Turning the tables, I started reviewing and reflecting on my own posts and comments, asking myself the following questions:

Am I being respectful and elevating the dialogue?
Am I high-jacking a thread and driving my own agenda?
Am I one-upping someone else’s experience?
Am I contributing to the angst and misery of society by commiserating with fellow erudites, assholes and scalawags?

What I needed to decide was how can I be my best self on Facebook and feel like my words are positively impacting my friends?

I also felt like this open forum would be a great place to challenge myself to try to be always positive, humorous and joyful instead of complaining about something. I tasked myself to do this each and every single damn day of my life. Thus, I created something called Simple Gratitude. In the culture of love and light, it seems everything published online needs to take on the tenor of massive universal impact. But for me, and typically on Mondays, just stepping out of my pajamas and washing my hair is all the impact I’m making. This task to create a daily habit required two ingredients: simplicity and commitment.

For all of us there are days where everything is going wrong. There is simply no glass half full scenario and yet, in spite of that, I still needed to think about something, one thing, to be my simple gratitude. Some days it was like extracting lint between my toes or having to ponder for lonely, long-drawn out windows of time my place of gratitude.

Then one day it happened: I accidentally became genuinely grateful.

Here are four ways I am now artfully practicing simple gratitude on the annals of Facebook and in my personal life.

I conscientiously formed a new and healthy habit: I realized that this exercise, at first rote and painful, became a healthy and joyful habit over time. This means not only am I more directed towards embodying gratitude, but I am less inclined to play the victim, martyr or be the first to criticize or complain. This also is a proven experiment that there may be other things in my life that I also have the ability to create new, equally productive behaviors.
Truly practicing non-attachment: If you follow my posts on Facebook or the woefully neglected Simple Gratitude group page, you will soon know that #simplegratitude is seldom simple. Gratitude at times took a lot of work. Intentionally long-winded one day, hopelessly tragic and borderline absurd the next, with each gratitude, I was forming new muscle in my being: the muscle of accepting things as they are without the will to try and make them different or better.
I define the reality of my daily existence, not the situations happening around me: My life experience as I am choosing to engage and participate more often than not now are clearly on my terms. Often times, I would write something that at paragraph start read like a bad dream but by the end showed how any situation can be a lesson, a worthy reflection or even a place of empowerment based on my perception of it.
Gratitude is contagious: you can either be influenced by others or be the influencer. As I was falling down the rabbit hole of rants in my early days of Facebook keeping in tempo with some of my connections (long since removed), I have noticed that my gratitude is inspiring others to focus on the good, or at best better things in life, too. My friends are doing it their own way, on their own terms just like I am. Some are embracing the #simplegratitude movement which makes me smile. There may be one person today that by reading one of my silly or insightful SG’s might have a better day or adopt a different perspective on a situation.

What are you grateful for in your life? Say it, express it, write it down, or shout it out. What the world needs are less cynics and more lovers of their own lives.

Growing Up by Giving It All Away

October 19, 2015 By Ali Valdez

Aparigraha is one of the Yamas, part of the Yoga Sutras Eight-Limbed path and means non-hoarding, keeping nothing beyond the essentials and avoiding excessive accumulation.

By giving everything away, she grew. Not in things of material substance, possessions pawned off on E-bay but a lightness in being, and sweetness of spirit.

It started many years back, when a gardener on an atypically cold day commented on her sweatshirt in passing. A simple gray lightly worn thing touting her alma mater, he said simply, “My dad used to tend the grounds there. I loved visiting your campus when I was a kid.” His smile was sincere, spoken words with a warmth in his eyes. Noticing his size not too far off her own, she pulled the gray sweatshirt over her hand and handed it to him, “Here, keep it and think of your Dad.”

Get swept away in the generosity movement.

The rest of the day running around, grabbing breakfast with her boyfriend, she shivered with goose bumps riding up her arms. But he never asked her why she did it, because he knew. Sometimes it’s more important to give spontaneously in the moment than to keep for one’s self. Back home at their apartment, there was no wanting for sweatshirts, clothes to keep warm. But in that brief exchange on the street with the gardener, there was only that one moment, that brief eclipse in time when the alchemy of authentic connection and thinking impulsively of another’s needs first gave birth to a tiny little miracle. The gardener could have survived without the sweatshirt for the day on the material plane. Even just seeing the sweatshirt triggered a series of nostalgia that bloomed like a bouquet of fragrant memories in his mind. The spontaneity of the gift slightly took his breath away. The rest of the day, he was warmer, inside and out, thinking of his father, their shared trade, and the random passerby that gave him something meaningful.

There is a time in our life when we are left on our own to grow up. Some of us get shipped off to college, get jobs, and begin to set up a household of our own. The juice coursing through our ambitious veins remains steadily fueled on the values of our society, namely that of accumulation as a measurement of success. Starting off bunking in a one-bedroom, the getting into a small cottage, to buying one’s first home, successively we aspire to swipe more, buy more, upgrade and update. Until we have outfitted more rooms than we could possibly need and accumulate adult toys and fancier cars, we are just on the treadmill of materialism and once we’ve acquired enough, we have reached a new plateau with another level of accumulation eagerly awaiting. This is exhausting over time with individuals looking around and asking how many asses do they really need to sit in all these chairs, or backs to bear in these rooms decorated with empty beds?

Aparigraha, or non-hoarding, is a yogic Yama, an observance for a higher standard of living. This concept simply defies everything we are conventionally taught today in America. We are conditioned to feed our needs and desires, entitled to do so excessively by our own means. Wall Street, capitalism, free markets are all about growth through excessive consumption. If there is not constant-consumerism, whether it be material items, entertainment, or information, it would be hard to see how our country would stay afloat. It is impossible to stave off our own hunger to have and to hold: property, possessions, not people.

Aparigraha in its fullest expression, is the liberty to be carefree with your sweatshirt. See a need in others, or an opportunity to create joy, your resources will be endless as will your state of Santosha, or contentment. Hoard your stuff, cling to it mercilessly are you will always been blind-sided by a lust to accumulate more.

Clutter and accumulation create a heaviness and a reflection of pursuing external realities from internal joy; you can consider it Bhoga, not Yoga. There is a current “tidiness” movement out of Japan that is reminding us to buy less, and keep only those things that bring incredible joy. Expanding on that further, can we even be willing to share that joy out to others by giving away what we most treasure , sharing or even refraining from buying at all and instead donating to help others. Less and less do we want to grow from the stuff that we have in life, but in our capacity to give it away. True non-attachment means that at any time we can be joyful with little to nothing and model of life increasingly less dependent on the burden of stuff.

A billionaire tech executive sitting on piles of money and accumulating interest at an absurd rate decides to build a global foundation serving large global concerns and creates a plan to give it all away. Is sitting on hoards of money, big retirement funds of investment portfolios really serving you but at the expense of others an equal form of hoarding like a clothing full of unworn clothing?

A friend is divorcing, needing a fresh start, so a friend helps decorate his new apartment, supplying him with all the essentials, and still returned home to everything she needed. She gave and helped create shelter during uncertain times.

So proud of her awesome book collection and the ‘oohs and ahhs’ she received when she toured people through her library, one day a woman becomes an anonymous contributor to a community resource center library. She grew her knowledge of the needs of her local community and still knew she would not lose her intelligence.

Whenever we pause before buying, understanding our true motives and knowing what gives use access to real joy, we are empowered to put something down. We have suddenly never been happier when not going to the mall for months at a time. By giving away and avoiding excessive accumulation we grow: not in the currency of materiality but in lightness.

This article was originally published in the Five Tattvas Embodied Philosophy blog at: http://www.fivetattvas.com/blog/2015/9/4/aparigraha-and-she-grew-yamas-series-no-2

Starting Over: Three Lessons When Rebuilding Your Practice

September 14, 2014 By Ali Valdez Leave a Comment

by Ali Valdez

Starting over in any situation is hard to do, especially when you devote your life to something with passion and focus, you are willing to work yourself to the depths, doing whatever it takes to see those gradual, incremental improvements. People new to yoga walk in and see a more seasoned practitioner in something like peacock feather pose and think, “I want to do that!” They have little understanding or appreciating of the amount of time and effort goes into mastery of that type of asana, unless of course, they are as strong and hearty as a silverback gorilla or preternaturally bendy.

Yoga and or advancement in any ‘field’ takes a lot of dedication: a daily ritual with prioritization, time and clearly defined objectives. But athletic or work that requires your body is different than work in the office. Maybe you have become a subject matter expert in Human Resources or Law, but when you get physically injured, you can still go on billing hourly.

When you are a yoga teacher, injuries could mean time off the clock or being sent out to pasture. So a surgery needed to happen, and for a while, I sat and waited.

I had eight weeks of being on the bench. The hardest thing after the stir craziness of being sedentary is the reality of coming back to the mat and rebuilding my practice. As a teacher this can be even harder mentally and physically than you think

because people look at you, to you, to embody the poses with perfect alignments, elegance in movement and ease. Here are three valuable pointers that I would like to share from my experience this month:

Patience & Empathy. You are now, for a brief moment, that student new to yoga. The empathy you gain for the beginning student as a teacher starting back into the practice is invaluable. You come to appreciate the tentativeness, the lack of certainty, the self-consciousness of finding these forms with your body anew. This is a crash course in remembering to really break poses down, step by step and reacquaint your body with what it felt like for the first time. Patience with yourself is extended patience with your students.
Be Fearless. No time like the present to cash in on all the health claims and benefits of yoga. Your body and your practice will come back. It might be different, sure, but adapting to change is always part of the yogi’s equation. One of my beloved yogi friends was told after repetitive use injuries coding endlessly for a high tech juggernaut that he would never be able to use his hands again, let alone practice yoga. Had he taken this to heart, and given up, he would not be in service to his communities in Hawaii and Connecticut now. Instead, he was fearless, and yes his practice changed; it got even better. For me, I was doing stuff no human should be doing right after a surgery of my magnitude, and yet, I was able to recover very well. My “sending love and lighters” I took to heart believing that their healing intentions and prayers would help accelerate my healing. They did.
Embracing the Now with Gratitude. I cannot tell you how much more present I am in the moment once something was cherished was taken away but now restored. I am on my mat, finally practicing for two hours a day again and thanking God every second I settle in deeper, hold longer, lift up higher. Sensations in my body are like reunions with long lost loves. I am overwhelmed by the splendor of being back in a now stronger, healthier body. Joy is soaring inside my heart. Any lost interest for the practice after working tirelessly has been rekindled with a newfound and gentle sweetness. That is worth a #simplegratitude right there.